Companies use information management infrastructures to store and manage the companies' data. Specifically, companies may implement one or more content management systems to store and manage specific types of content. For example, a company may implement Microsoft® Outlook® to store and manage electronic mail for all individuals in the company and Documentum® to manage other electronic files (e.g., text documents, image files, spreadsheets, multimedia files, etc.). (Microsoft and Outlook are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Wash.; Documentum is a registered trademark of the EMC Corporation in Hopkinton, Mass.).
Each of the aforementioned content management systems store content (i.e., files) as well as associated metadata. The metadata may be obtained from the file, obtained from another source, and/or manually input by a user into the content management system. The information stored in the metadata as well as the manner in which the information is stored in the metadata is defined by the content management system.
Custom applications are typically developed to migrate the content between two content management systems. The custom applications are typically designed for the specific migration and must be re-coded in order to be used to perform another migration. As an alternative, documents may be migrated between content management systems in an ad hoc manner.